MONITOR RESOLUTION: Probably just whatever works best once it's all put together, hopefully 1920x1080 because it's the monitor's preferred resolution

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Just purchased the lot earlier this afternoon, hope to be building it by Friday. I feel like it's the best I could buy for the price range I had. Please comment and let me know what you think! Here's the setup:

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You bought the RAM already? They aren't good for their price, you could of gotten 1333mhz CL7 RAM at the same price or like 2 dollars more.

Switch to a samsung spinpoint f3 hard drive.

Your mobo doesn't allow you to sli/crossfire in the future, because it's x16 x4. If you don't care about crossfire/sli in the future, then you're fine. If you do care, switch the mobo to P55-UD4P

why aren't you overclocking? you benefit from overclocking in games, by getting more fps, although turbo boost may be fine, but manual overclock is always better.

also if you do plan on crossfire/sli later, then the power supply you picked isn't good because it only has one 6-pin connector and one 6+2pin connector. you need to get a power supply that has two 6pin connectors with two 6+2pin connectors, that's if you plan on crossfire/sli in future

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I think that looks like a really good build. Only thing I can think is that I would've picked up either a Samsung Spinpoint F3 500 GB (single-platter) drive or Western Digital Caviar Black 640 GB (320 GB dual platter design). Both would've been faster than the one you bought. But really, that's probably not a big deal. Have fun building.

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I don't really care about the future SLI/Crossfire. The features of the mobo do say "Support ATI CrossFireX for ultimate graphics performance;" but like I said, not a big deal. I'll probably just purchase a new graphics card and sell the old 4870 when I decide I need an upgrade.

The RAM sounded pretty solid to me. However, I'm not a hardware junkie by any means. Why would '1333MHz CL7' be better than what I got? Is mine CL8? (EDIT: Ah, CL7 means 7-7-7 timings and CL8 is 8-8-8. How much of a difference will this make?)

The HDD I also thought was pretty solid, if I had your guys' input earlier today I might've gone with the Spinpoint F3 or WD Caviar Black. How big of a difference do those make compared to the 500GB WD I got?

(EDIT: And I do have a copy of Windows 7 Pro... Rec'd it through my university for free!)

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^You are funny, he said he's not overclocking already, why you suggesting such an expensive heatsink? He just needs an aftermarket one that's cheap and does the job better than the stock one.

To OP: Get this heatsink, it's cheap and decent. Hyper 212 Plus , get it on newegg, it's 30 dollars. The i7 860 have Turbo Boost, so it overclocks a little by itself, so this heatsink is the perfect match for you.

"The RAM sounded pretty solid to me. However, I'm not a hardware junkie by any means. Why would '1333MHz CL7' be better than what I got? Is mine CL8? (EDIT: Ah, CL7 means 7-7-7 timings and CL8 is 8-8-8. How much of a difference will this make?) "

^Well, not much of a difference, since you got it already there's no point. Basically the CL7 is the same price offering better performance (lower latencies, faster bandwidth, but just a little)

"The HDD I also thought was pretty solid, if I had your guys' input earlier today I might've gone with the Spinpoint F3 or WD Caviar Black. How big of a difference do those make compared to the 500GB WD I got? "

Not a big difference, just a small difference, the Spinspoint f3 is a faster hard drive than the WD Caviar Black, and it's cheaper. Since you bought it already, it's pointless.

In the context of $1200 + dollars, a $30 difference in heatsinks is not "such an expensive" upgrade. I didn't plan to overclock when I first built, but 3 months later I completely changed my mind and ended up having to take my motherboard out, fool with thermal compound, then put everything back in place.

To be completely honest, I didn't really have much knowledge of the Hyper 212, though, lol.

And also a more powerful PSU (once again in case I Crossfire/SLI). However, I don't really know how powerful the PSU would have to be, so I was hoping to get some input from you guys on that. I need a PSU that's a good price, has 2x 6-pin and 2x 6+2-pin connectors, and is powerful to run my system with an additional graphics card. (EDIT: The Newegg PSU calculator says I would need a 826W PSU! I specified the i7 processor, high-end motherboard, 4890 series GPU, 8GB's of DDR3 RAM, DVD-RW drive, and a 7200rpm HDD. Here's the link to the PSU calculator: http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html)

In the context of $1200 + dollars, a $30 difference in heatsinks is not "such an expensive" upgrade. I didn't plan to overclock when I first built, but 3 months later I completely changed my mind and ended up having to take my motherboard out, fool with thermal compound, then put everything back in place.

To be completely honest, I didn't really have much knowledge of the Hyper 212, though, lol.

Check the performance of your suggested heatsink against hyper 212 plus, I'm sure they perform 1-3C temperature by each other. i've read a lot of good reviews on the hyper 212 plus.

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Awesome thanks for the good input guys. I posted threads about this setup on Anandtech and another forum and got only a few replies over a long period of time, and you all also had better advice.

And by the way overshocks, when I talked to them earlier tonight they said just to call them up and organize the refund. As long as I haven't opened the packages they said there would be no restocking fee.

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Awesome thanks for the good input guys. I posted threads about this setup on Anandtech and another forum and got only a few replies over a long period of time, and you all also had better advice.

And by the way overshocks, when I talked to them earlier tonight they said just to call them up and organize the refund. As long as I haven't opened the packages they said there would be no restocking fee.